Wednesday 11 April 2018

Adonai vs Yahweh - Two Charts for the One Lord

OF COURSE I am playing on words with my title here. Both "Yahweh" and "Adonai" are pointing to the same Israelite God. But how they are used is my subject of interest here. We started that in my previous post, How does the Adonai cookie crumble? It wasn't too hard to put some of my research into a graphical format, something I don't think I ever tried on this blog before, so here goes in the form of two helpful charts!





Comments

  • Until we reach the Psalms, the Adonai data is extremely low: only 46 occurrences total, with an average of 2-3 occurrences per book up to that point.
  • In terms of concentration, it's a similar story: only 0.01% of Hebrew words before Psalms are the word "Adonai"; that's an average of 1 word in every 10,000.
  • Yahweh is going to be an altogether different story: Up to and including 2 Chronicles, Yahweh (a.k.a "the LORD") is mentioned 3,823 times, an average of over 270 occurrences per biblical book. For these first 14 books, that's an extraordinary average of 1 word in every 84 being "Yahweh".
  • The smallest gaps in concentrations occur in Ezekiel, Lamentations and Amos, where Yahweh concentrations vary from triple to double the number of Adonai occurrences. After those three, and excluding the very low Lord-reference books like Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon and Daniel, the gaps widen suddenly and on a great scale.
  • Hopefully, these huge differences will help us realise that when examining the usages, the number one thing to bear in mind is sheer scale, which has a bearing on the comparison aspect of my divine Name research (it is only one aspect, fortunately): the data pool for the Pentateuch is even smaller: 18 Adonai-s against 1,838 Yahweh-s.
  • That parameter is significant if, like some LXX scholars like Larry Perkins, we accept that the anarthrous rule was devised at the outset when only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were translated. 18 is also such a small number for such a large volume, that it might be possible to assert that there were no Adonai in the original Hebrew Pentateuch, these few additions. being added as copies and recensions succeeded the decaying originals, or "orthographs".
  • The amount of data I will have available to analyse Adonai with regard to the Greek article will be small, and will require further control data. My research into the anarthrous rule on the Yahweh side has already led me to exclude certain Greek cases: vocative, dative and accusative because of either common necessity or non-necessity of Greek articles, even for names. Fortunately, nominative and genitive are among the most important cases and are those affected by the rule, but we can expect the pool to be made smaller still when analysing articles included with Kyrios as a translation for Adonai.
  • Further control data could take the form of the most popular human character of the book and a title other than "Lord" used by the book (the most likely being king and god, possibly both if I can get round to it).
  • With the appraisal in hand of how a proper name and a regular title are handled by the translator, we can deduce if Adonai was affected by the rule or not. A halfway position could be indicative of recensional activity (i.e. lesser articles than a title would be expected for the book, but still more articles than Yahweh in the nominative and genitive).

NB data slightly updated to integrate "Adoun" (Strongs H113) when used to refer to God, with a total of 4 such occurrences by my count (Ex 23:17, 34:23, Is 10:33 and Mal 3:1). 

Related posts:


Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: Results
Is Jesus' Other Name "Yahweh" for the first-century church? Part 1: The Data
Why This Research Matters
Larry Perkins: paper review

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